Number of Respondents: 46/76 (61%)

The instructor(s) helped me to understand the course concepts.

Average: 4.74

Standard Deviation: 0.49

Strongly Disagree	Disagree	Neutral	Agree	Strongly Agree	No Basis for Rating
0	0	1	10	35	0
0%	0%	2.17%	21.74%	76.09%	0%

Comments

[Strongly Agree] Excellent instructor, really

[Strongly Agree] Ross's lectures really helped me understand the concepts presented in the course. In class, he articulated course concepts in a clear, concise and relatable manner, making examples and analogies when appropriate. After each core concept, he would pause to ask questions, allowing us to seek clarification when required. This is particularly appreciated considering the actual content inside CS 246 is pretty heavy. During office hours, Ross helped explain issues we had in the assignment in a helpful and clarifying manner, but in a way where we still had to think critically about the concepts at hand (instead of simply giving away the answer), which in my opinion is indicative of a good instructor. On Piazza, response time between him and Kris (the other instructor) was good, and the instructors responses are always professional and helpful to the question being asked. I also greatly appreciated the time Ross spent with me personally outside of office hours -- in his own personal time- to help me better understand course and assignment questions. Particularly, I like how he personally identified final exam studying techniques for me after I struggled with the midterm

[Strongly Agree] Thanks for the great term Ross! You are already an incredible instructor and your future students will be lucky to have you!

The instructor(s) created a supportive environment that helped me learn (Supportive environments enable students to feel included and valued regardless of any aspect of their identity).

Average: 4.63

Standard Deviation: 0.6

Strongly Disagree	Disagree	Neutral	Agree	Strongly Agree	No Basis for Rating
0	0	3	11	32	0
0%	0%	6.52%	23.91%	69.57%	0%

Comments

[Strongly Agree] Ross Evans always made an effort to meet with me during office hours and it was very helpful and much appreciated!

[Neutral] No course note + solution made me hard to study

[Strongly Agree] Ross was professional, was always approachable and never judgemental when help was needed, either after class, during his office hours, or on Piazza. During class, his positive and relaxed attitude mixed in with occasional jokes created a supportive environment for learning, and his pause for questions after every topic made me feel open to asking questions. In office hours, I found he spent a lot of time with each student, going into the questions they had in detail and never running out of patience, despite it meaning office hours would go overtime and eat into his personal time.

The instructor(s) stimulated my interest in this course.

Average: 4.56

Standard Deviation: 0.65

Strongly Disagree	Disagree	Neutral	Agree	Strongly Agree	No Basis for Rating
0	0	4	12	29	1
0%	0%	8.7%	26.09%	63.04%	2.17%

Comments

[Strongly Agree] Ross highly stimulated my interest in the course, with his explanations of C++, Object Orientated Programming and the examples presented in class allowing me to see all the cool things I can do with my knowledge in the course. Furthermore, the examples shows me the practical use of course concepts presented.

[Strongly Agree] Lectures were very entertaining

The intended learning outcomes were identified (Learning outcomes/objectives articulate what students should be able to know, do, and/or value by the end of a course).

Average: 4.54

Standard Deviation: 0.62

Strongly Disagree	Disagree	Neutral	Agree	Strongly Agree	No Basis for Rating
0	0	3	15	28	0
0%	0%	6.52%	32.61%	60.87%	0%

Comments

[Strongly Agree] Ross clearly identified learning objectives in lecture -- The first thing he did at the beginning of every class was to identify what was learnt in the previous class and what will be learnt in today's class.

The course activities prepared me for the graded work.

Average: 4.13

Standard Deviation: 0.99

Strongly Disagree	Disagree	Neutral	Agree	Strongly Agree	No Basis for Rating
1	3	5	17	20	0
2.17%	6.52%	10.87%	36.96%	43.48%	0%

Comments

[Agree] Would have appreciated assigned readings for lectures (course notes and/or text) as some topics were complicated and required finding my own resources.

[Strongly Agree] Know his stuff REALLY WELL!!!! Very smart and good at teaching

[Strongly Agree] The general course content, and particularly the examples that Ross covered prepared me for the assignments. However (and through no fault of Ross, as there is a lot of content in the course), it would be better to have more examples.

[Neutral] The content in the class was a very simplified version of the course work. I felt that it didn't cover the more complex methods.

The intended learning outcomes were assessed through my graded work.

Average: 4.28

Standard Deviation: 0.74

Strongly Disagree	Disagree	Neutral	Agree	Strongly Agree	No Basis for Rating
0	1	5	20	20	0
0%	2.17%	10.87%	43.48%	43.48%	0%

The course workload demands were...

Average: 4.3

Standard Deviation: 0.72

Very Low	Low	Average	High	Very High	No Basis for Rating
0	0	7	18	21	0
0%	0%	15.22%	39.13%	45.65%	0%

Comments

[Very High] Variance in the week to week demands, but A4 was extremely demanding. A5 looks like it may be as well.

[Very High] CS 246 was a really workload heavy course, and I spent a great deal of time on this course, which included understanding the concepts and the assignments, and how to implement them and their debugging.

Text Questions

The most important thing I learned in this course was:

How to develop C++ programs with proper design patterns and learning how to design and implement them. I also learned the semantics of the C++ language and various intricacies to watch out for.

Cpp

Software Engineering side of things of CS

Objected oriented principles.

The title of the course?

I learned about object oriented programming with the language c++, this was very new and challenging but it was very cool being able to learn a large amount of stuff in a short time period.

Basic c++ knowledge

C++ techniques

object oriented programming, and the different design patterns.

C++

How to implement large programs using classes and inheritance. Also time management since the commitment for this course was significantly greater than my other courses.

Proper OOP with different design patterns and makefiles

Learning about inheritance

The most Important thing I learned in the course was the principles of Object Orientated Programming , as well as Bash and C++

C++ and vectors and daily lectures

Proper software engineering principles. An introduction to writing more efficient and scaleable code was something I really looked forward to and this course definitely delivered. I certainly believe that the concepts I was taught will be useful for my future projects and programming positions.

Design pattern

There were many useful concepts for software development

object oriented programming principles

everything, super helpful course!

Object Oriented Software Development

Concepts of object oriented programming.

Design structures

I feel like I had a good grasp of a lot of C++ before coming into this course, but I first saw design patterns here and thought they were incredibly useful and interesting.

Design patterns for OOP

Design patterns.

Ask for help

Design Patterns

drop the course if struggling!!!!!

how to design like an expert

What helped me to learn in this course was:

One on one time with instructors during office hours was very helpful

The professor's notes were very helpful in giving actual examples to understand the concepts and during office hours, the professor was very patient and helpful in reexplaining concepts and deepening our understanding

Practice problems and actually coding everything myself.

Tomodachi

Passionate instructor, very knowledge and always patient to answer any student questions

Prof Evans was one of the best CS professors I have had so far. His lectures were very clear and understandable, which made learning in this difficult course much easier to manage.

Ross is very smart, he catches every questions and offers excellent reply! VERY VERY VERY SMART.

The lectures, assignments, tutorials and practice questions. Also, the profs were very engaging and made sure to teach the material well.

Extra research

Practicing what I've learned in class through assignments

Ross was great :)

how well and thorough explained each topic was by Prof Evans

Lectures

Tutorial sessions were up to date and went through everything we learned the week before! Great job.

The teachers notes and examples in lectures, very well explained and everything was written down

Doing assignments

Going to lectures, office hours and the piazza support really help me understand the content in the course

My own lecture notes

The lectures were really well planned out and covered a lot of basis. Having Professor Ross to always talk to and clear any confusions was also super helpful, and most importantly, having both Professor Ross and Professor Kris available during their office hours really helped me develop a thorough understand of each of the concepts taught throughout the course. I really believe that practice makes perfect in this course, and with the guidance and pointers from the instructors, it was really helpful.

The lecture

The assignments were good practice for gaining an understanding of the concepts

attending lectures!! Ross' lectures were very informative

having lots of (interesting) examples and seeing all of the concepts come together in a way that helped with the assignments. also having the two due dates was super helpful because it made me focus on actually thinking about the assignment before I started it and helped me better understand what I was going into and how I should go about it as well as giving me time to actually debug and test my programs and then further get a better understanding.

the piazza discussion board was also super helpful!

Assignments

Ross, who was really engaging in all his lectures. He was also really active on piazza and his office hours helped me a lot as well.

Doing assignments

Assignments were really helpful for cementing the details of lectures.

2 weeks allowance for assignments, with DD1 generally being lighter.

Ross was a great prof and made classes interesting with his humor! He was also very knowledgeable and could always answer questions, even if they strayed from the course content.

Getting help

Help from others in understanding the more complex uses of the things taught in class

Don't want to fail the course

tutorials and textbook

What changes, if any, would I suggest for this course?

Extra materials outside of blackboard notes for learning (i.e. course notes and text readings) would help a lot with covering complicated topics.

I would suggest to offer more examples to really deepen certain concepts as some examples might be too simplistic as compared to the course work.

Less test suites

Pacing could be a bit slower. Some design patterns could use more than one example

N/A

No suggestions, the course is hard and painful, but I like the course because the instructor is GREAT! Best instructor ever.

more practice questions would be helpful. Also, more review sessions would help significantly since the midterm was found challenging.

Solution and course note

Midterm was too long

The assignments are hard :(

Give more time on assignments.

There should be less C++ specific (ie. syntax, compiler, makefile) content on midterm, and have more OOP/design pattern content.

Please create course notes.

Samples of code posted on the website (design patterns, etc)

Please provide more examples on the CS server before the assignment comes out

The course is a bit fast paced and heavy for me. Hopefully, with the implementation of CS 136L, CS246 can become a bit less heavy and a bit more relaxing.

No changes just get more mature instructors and do not rush in lectures as I remind you that you are not providing lecture notes. But I liked the thing to not provide lecture notes which actually motivated me to go to classes regularly.

I honestly don't have many suggestions, I found it a great course- probably my favourite this semester!

The tests and assignment 4 is too hard

make the assignment easier

It would be nice if there were concept checks / practice questions / small quizzes (though with little to no grade weightage, this course has a lot of work already. Perhaps participation marks if needed?) I found that while I understood the principles of many concepts, on the midterm, I struggled with the True/False and multiple choice questions. Questions in which you need to quickly analyze pieces of code and determine what the output is, whether or not there is a bug, etc. It would've been helpful if I had more practice with those sorts of questions. CS115 and CS136 both had concept checks, which I found useful.

learning the material required for assignments a bit earlier, sometimes we'd learn something important a bit sooner to the deadline which would add some pressure. but it was all manageable so thats just a minor thing

Please have lecture slides/course notes :(. More projector examples (DWE/Plant Ops, fix your classrooms!) and more polling the class (even though it’s scary it helps me to understand and parse out concepts by seeing other students reacting).

When I went to the other 246 section, I also really enjoyed the consistent jokes and relaxed (but still serious) atmosphere Kris had at his lectures. Ross also had some of that but a bit more of it would be cool.

Give Notes That we can read from

The course goes at a very high pace. Also, this is not so a change in the course material but the servers throughout the four months were really slow and down a lot of the times. This caused us a lot stress but both Ross and Kris helped us deal with it in the best way possible.

A lighter load for A3 and A4, given proximity to the midterm and a higher dependance on design patterns/implementation of logic beyond simply what is discussed in lecture.

Being forced to do a group project at the end isn't ideal. It would be nice to have a solo project option that has a lower workload.

Update course notes for design patterns, specifically observer

To give different types of examples for certain concepts taught in class so that we aren't stuck with one specific way that may not be similar to what we get on the assignment

Raised the weight of A5, or lower the workload. Please give a curve!!!!!!!!!!!!!